Politics_Observer wrote:@MistyTiger
But then if this lawsuit reaches the Supreme Court, in order for the justices to remain consistent and to have their past rulings to remain legitimate, given their current ruling on affirmative action, they will now have no choice but to get rid of legacy admissions. Otherwise, their most recent ruling on affirmative action really isn't legitimate and will be seen as trying to maintain unjust excessive power and privilege to the predominantly white wealthy who benefit from legacy admissions. This would not serve the interests of justice or law.
The courts would then become merely just an instrument of power and ensuring that those who havepower, keep their power and that it is no longer an instrument of justice or law. The court will no longer be seen as legitimate, because of inconsistent rulings that do not serve the best interests of justice. Rather, they would only serve the interests of one thing and one thing only: POWER. Even if it goes against, and contradicts, the best interests of justice.
I really think you have some kind of Pollyanna version of what law is about sometimes PO. The Law can and has been immoral, oppressive and unjust for centuries. The law is an instrument of power ALWAYS wielded by the rulemakers of a society that actively participate in keeping their own power seats going. Everyone with any tiny bit of research knows this PO.
All you need to do is read law codes. My sister is a lawyer and the truth is legal shit bores me. But I read enough case law and the history of precedent to know that morality=law or justice=law does not necessarily happen at all. Most good lawyers charge a lot of money to defend their clients. People with no means to defend themselves who are poor usually do not get a decent legal defense. They are not going to get a Dream Team legal Eagle team if their pockets are shallow and not deep. That is a fact. Especially in the US court system. Most people in jail today are not wealthy and if they are wealthy they are not going to be doing the hard time poor convicts will be doing. That is a fact as well.
Civil law suits against very powerful defendants like insurance companies, banks and corporations will not be losing a lot of those lawsuits because they can and do hire the best lawyers to defend them. Many lawyers never choose to fight against very powerful corporations, banks and other financially powerful institutions in society because the odds of winning of those lawsuits are low. And again, a lawyer does not take up a cause that will require a lot of their time, efforts and preparation to end in failure and if they are on a contingency plan with a client that is poor as hell and without means they will have to take a financial hit. And lawyers are not a charity and never have been PO.
Legacy admissions reflect what elite universities are in the USA. They are there to serve the elite. And many of them used to take only the most brilliant and outstanding poor or lower class students because those students were so bright and so talented innately that to deny them admission meant that everyone would know how small and racist and unjust the institution was. Some of the most radical Leftists in African American history of all time graduated from Harvard. Puerto Ricans too. And many others. None were legacy admissions. But they were considered off the scale in talent and intelligence, discipline and character.
They were not destroyed by the scorn and rejections of the elite ones. Who were there via legacy admissions and had been taught their entire lives that the lower classes will always produce inferior products and that they were justified in oppressing or exploiting them. By taking on the best of the lower classes and making them feel excluded fromj their club? They could assuage their collective white guilt full of the truth that they were frauds of brilliance. They were just the sons of their wealthy fathers buying their power for them in the annals of Academia.
That is a very old class conscious story PO. I wonder about why you thought that law equals justice. The law has to be pressured hard to change. It is the slowest of all the branches of government to change. The last of the last. It usually has to be done through a challenge on the outside and then having the agents of change become judges and powerful people. Brown vs. The Board of Education in the 1950s was a major change in law. Before the law code for justifying separate but equal in education was that each district had to reflect the community that the school was located in. And the law IGNORED the reality that poor people who never own their own properties in urban and rural towns all across the USA had these all Black and all Indian and so on communities that had a very low tax rate due to poverty. And that races were segregated according to economic means. Which meant that the schools were not equal. In terms of plumbling, new books for studying, teacher experience in terms of years teaching the subject matter, and many other details. The separate but unequal was reality. The legal system ignored it.
Thurgood Marshall knew this. And he challenged the legal system. And he changed it. But if you are asleep at the wheel of politics in the USA? You will wind up losing the SCOTUS to a bunch of judges that do believe in separate and UNEQUAL. And will manipulate the law to be in alignment with that value because that is what conservative politics is all about. It never was about equality. It is about class and preserving the system that helps them retain power. And in the USA it is European extraction people, with land, who owned slaves in the past and who's descendants inherited wealth, power and privilege and have zero intention of sharing power with the riff raff. Period.
The law is about power. It always has been. All you need to do is figure out how many US presidents in the White House were lawyers over the entire history ol the USA as a nation? George Washington was a General in the Revolutionary War. After him how many were lawyers? An overwhelming number. If power was not about laws? What the hell are these lawyers doing in the senate and the house and the judicial branch? Taking lint out of their belly buttons?
... yes, that's basically what I'm asking.
(a point I would disagree with, but anyway...)
- By wat0n